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by quaunaut 3646 days ago
It's been awhile since I've used Django, but I work with those who use it frequently. Django certainly shouldn't be put out to pasture- but you'd be surprised just how robust and production-ready Phoenix is.

Of course, no one can tell you whether it's good for your particular business case- but Erlang is battle-tested, and Elixir/Phoenix have made it both easy to reason about and perfect for being productive. If one had the option of choosing a framework right now, I don't know of many reasons to not use Phoenix.

1 comments

> I don't know of many reasons to not use Phoenix.

Personally my biggest reservation would be the difficulty of debugging production issues that span two languages - Elixir and Erlang – when I have no familiarity with the underlying language (and when that language is not widely used, and therefore likely to be sparse on StackOverflow).

That's not to say I wouldn't use Phoenix; it's just that that's the biggest drawback I can think of (aside from general ecosystem maturity, which it sounds like is on an impressive clip).

EDIT: Oh, and Elixir doesn't have support for static type analysis (though it does have typespecs[0], and there is Erlang's dialyzer[2]...). Python has mypy[1], and JavaScript has TypeScript/Flow.

[0] http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/typespecs-and-behavio...

[1] http://mypy-lang.org/

[2] http://erlang.org/doc/man/dialyzer.html

In the year or so I've been working with Elixir, I've not had to learn a lick of Erlang besides a couple of function calls I can get at directly from Elixir.

Nor have I heard of anyone else having that issue. It's one of the reasons I enjoy it so much- I get all the performance with none of the complexity.